Backup Central

In an effort to fulfill an offsite backup requirement I had the idea to place a password protected
tar archive onto one or more of our users laptops. The laptops are taken home each night and
it would be quick to ftp the archive sometime during the day.

Does anyone think this is a bad idea?

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On Tuesday, January 31, 2012, at 12:36:13 PM, Joe Konecny wrote:

Does anyone think this is a bad idea?

Very bad idea. Many of the worst privacy issues in the past several years
have resulted from theft of a laptop that contained confidential files. If
you encrypt the copy with a very strong passphrase, the idea might be
acceptable, but otherwise it would be a worse security risk than not having
offsite backup at all.

--
Jim Kyle
mailto: jim < at > jimkyle.com


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On Tuesday 31 January 2012 13:36:13 Joe Konecny wrote:
In an effort to fulfill an offsite backup requirement I had the idea to
place a password protected tar archive onto one or more of our users
laptops. The laptops are taken home each night and it would be quick to
ftp the archive sometime during the day.

Does anyone think this is a bad idea?

Replace that "password protected" by "gpg encrypted" and you get a good idea.
A very good idea is when the private key is only on a secure machine in the
admins possesion (and on an encrypted stick at the bosses home), only the
public key is needed to encrypt the backup. Then the decryption can only be
done with the private key. And onced you had to use that for a restore, you
generate (and use!) a new key-pair for the new backups.

Have fun,

Arnold
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On 1/31/2012 4:39 PM, Jim Kyle wrote:
On Tuesday, January 31, 2012, at 12:36:13 PM, Joe Konecny wrote:

Does anyone think this is a bad idea?
Very bad idea. Many of the worst privacy issues in the past several years
have resulted from theft of a laptop that contained confidential files. If
you encrypt the copy with a very strong passphrase, the idea might be
acceptable, but otherwise it would be a worse security risk than not having
offsite backup at all.


Certainly the security is of concern and yes we would encrypt it with a
password. But to me
it seems like a very nice way to get a backup offsite. What would have
happened if I lost
an Amanda tape back when we used it?

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On 1/31/2012 6:07 PM, Arnold Krille wrote:
On Tuesday 31 January 2012 13:36:13 Joe Konecny wrote:
In an effort to fulfill an offsite backup requirement I had the idea to
place a password protected tar archive onto one or more of our users
laptops. The laptops are taken home each night and it would be quick to
ftp the archive sometime during the day.

Does anyone think this is a bad idea?
Replace that "password protected" by "gpg encrypted" and you get a good idea.
A very good idea is when the private key is only on a secure machine in the
admins possesion (and on an encrypted stick at the bosses home), only the
public key is needed to encrypt the backup. Then the decryption can only be
done with the private key. And onced you had to use that for a restore, you
generate (and use!) a new key-pair for the new backups.



Yes security will be addressed. But idea of transporting the archive
offsite with a laptop
that goes home each day is good I think.

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On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 5:22 PM, Joe Konecny <jkonecny < at > rmtohio.com> wrote:


Yes security will be addressed.  But idea of transporting the archive
offsite with a laptop
that goes home each day is good I think.

Most of the 'bad idea' part is who is responsible if the content is
stolen. As long as the content owner/company is OK with it being
where it is, move on with the technical issues. Backuppc isn't
great at generating simple portable files. If you want the whole
archive you pretty much have to do an image copy of the partition
holding it (with nothing changing). That's not impossible, but you
might do better with an external laptop-sized drive.

--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell < at > gmail.com

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On Tuesday 31 January 2012 18:22:29 Joe Konecny wrote:
On 1/31/2012 6:07 PM, Arnold Krille wrote:
Replace that "password protected" by "gpg encrypted" and you get a good
idea. A very good idea is when the private key is only on a secure
machine in the admins possesion (and on an encrypted stick at the
bosses home), only the public key is needed to encrypt the backup. Then
the decryption can only be done with the private key. And onced you had
to use that for a restore, you generate (and use!) a new key-pair for
the new backups.

Yes security will be addressed. But idea of transporting the archive
offsite with a laptop
that goes home each day is good I think.

Taking the "tape" home is basically your off-site-storage. So, yes, thats a
very good idea. Our customers are told to do the same with their tapes (some
even follow this advice).

But if its your responsibility to care for the security, better not rely on
protection with a simple password. And anything below 100bytes/characters
counts as insecure.
So do the only sensible thing and use gpg or ssl certificates to encrypt the
"tapes" you sent off-site via laptops. And do the same when you sent them
offsite via tape or usb-stick.

Have fun,

Arnold
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Use torrent as cliet/server.
Clients will quickly share the torrent-file uploaded routinely by the
server

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